For Nigeria, breaking up has always been a probability. From day one in 1914, the composition of Nigeria was starkly unreasonable. The British ought to have taken cognizance of the fact that their own country, Great Britain, was not much larger than each of the Hausa-Fulani, Igbo and Yoruba nations in population – and in land area was only about the size of the Yoruba homeland in Nigeria, and less than half of the Hausa-Fulani homeland. How could they have decided that it made sense to strap together into one country these three largest nations of Black Africa? Separation hovered over the destiny of Nigeria from the very beginning.
And virtually everything that has happened in Nigeria and to Nigeria since the beginning has carried the banner of ultimate separation. For over 40 years (until 1949), the British simply didn’t know how to make Nigeria a country. The Southern and Northern Protectorates went their separate ways in almost all things.
But the separation was even deeper than the north-south dichotomy. Each of the three major peoples went their separate ways. The Yoruba, who had been living increasingly in towns and cities since about the 10th century, and who were therefore the owners of the only urban civilization in Black Africa, enjoyed, because of their towns and cities, a big head-start in attracting and absorbing the formative foreign influences that were dramatically changing the face of Africa from the mid-19th century on. Mission churches and schools were sprouting in the Yoruba towns by the 1850s. By the late 1860s, ambitious Yoruba families were sending their children for higher education abroad, and by the 1870s a Yoruba literate professional elite (of lawyers, doctors, engineers, architects, writers, journalists, teachers, pastors, merchants, etc) were emerging. The first newspaper (ambitiously written in the Yoruba language) started publishing in a Yoruba city in 1859, and others soon followed in various Yoruba towns and cities. By the time the British created their Nigeria in 1914, the Yoruba southwest was already far ahead of the rest of the new country in all facets of modernization.
In the rest of Southern Nigeria, Western education did not begin to take off until the 1920s. The Igbo and Ibibio peoples, the first after the Yoruba to produce university graduates, did not do so until the mid-1930s.
By and by, Christianity spread in all of Southern Nigeria. In Yorubaland, which had been a terminus of the ancient trade across the Sahara Desert from the Middle East for centuries, Islam had long had some presence, and it began to expand greatly in the course of the 19th century. By the 1880s, Christianity and Islam were locked in serious rivalry among Yoruba people. Happily, the traditional Yoruba religious tolerance and accommodation kicked in, and Yoruba folks of different religions lived on harmoniously, not only in Yoruba towns, but even in Yoruba households and families – thereby building what many observers now regard as perhaps the most religiously harmonious society in the world.
In the large, sprawling, Northern Nigeria, Christianity and Western education trickled ininto the homelands of the small peoples of the Middle Belt. Some of the peoples here even became predominantly Christian. But further north, in the homeland of the large Hausa-Fulani nation, where a radical brand of Islam held sway under Fulani rulers whose forebears had carried out a successful jihad in the 19th century, Christianity had little chance, though some localities accepted Christianity. Moreover, the British officials made the situation worse here by urging that the Christian missions should limit their activities to the homelands of the “pagans” and leave the Islamized peoples alone. Both Christianity and Western education were thus mostly denied to the large Hausa-Fulani homeland.
In short, though Nigeria was legally one “protectorate” ruled by the British, the most important developments had only reinforced the pre-British lines of cleavage. There was no direction towards, and no sense of, ONE COUNTRY. By 1946 when the British at last began to attend seriously to Nigeria, the logic of the realities of the situation pointed more towards separation into a number of different countries than towards the evolution of one country.
Many prominent persons in the Nigerian situation of the time voiced out these truths. Chief Obafemi Awolowo, then a rising leader among the Yoruba people of the Southwest, wrote in 1947: “Nigeria is not a nation. It is a mere geographical expression. .. The word “Nigerian” is merely a distinctive appellation to distinguish those who live within the boundaries of Nigeria from those who do not”.
In 1953, Sir Ahmadu Bello, leader of the Northern political elite, said: “Sixty years ago there was no country called Nigeria. What is now Nigeria consisted of a number of large and small communities all of which were different in their outlooks and beliefs. The advent of the British and of Western education has not materially altered the situation – – -”.
Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, who was to be the first Prime Minister of Nigeria, said that “the southern tribes who are now pouring into the North in ever increasing numbers are not welcome…. We . . . look upon them as invaders. Since 1914 the British government has been trying to make Nigeria into one country, but the Nigerian people themselves are historically different in their backgrounds, in their religious beliefs and customs, and do not show themselves any sign of willingness to unite. So what it comes to is that Nigerian unity is only a British intention in the country.”
Today, for good reasons, lots of Nigerians regret that the wisdom of these leading men of our race was ignored, and that the people in control of our corporate life went on to concoct a Nigeria for us. That that Nigeria has not worked is almost too trite to be repeated. But, the events of the past few years have brought the pains of Nigeria’s failure to levels of unbearable intensity. How can we get rid of the nagging pain and fear about the unknown fate of the Chibok school girls, or about the hundreds of other Nigerians who are being killed, maimed, and burnt alive, or about threats by Boko Haram that they will spread their terror to wherever we live, or about the total destruction of our country’s effectiveness by the crooked interplays of our differences?
How can we feel confident or comfortable to be Nigerians when we now find, as we are finding from various writings, that prominent citizens among us are at the bottom of the terror outrage, some prominent citizens who armed and funded terrorist gangs and sent some youths abroad for terrorist training – for the purpose of hurting the rest of us Nigerians, all because they want to control the country we all call ours?
Now, after learning of these horrendous breaches of confidence by men at the highest peaks of our country’s political life, how can the rest of us happily choose to continue to be citizens of this country? Surely, it does feel as if Nigeria’s dissolution is near.
